Collateral Damage: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 19)

by Jenna Bennett

  Jamal nodded. “Woulda looked good, though.”

  It would have. But— “Everyone else might have piled on too,” I said. “You might have gotten hurt. And someone might have insisted on the police being called in. I think it worked out pretty well the way it did.”

  Jamal shrugged. “A little blood never hurts when it comes to making your point.”

  Likely not. “Maybe you’ll get the chance when you go to pick up the car again.”

  “If the owner has any sense,” Alexandra said, “he’ll keep Clay far away from Jamal when we come back. No legitimate business owner would want a scene like that.”

  No. And if the owner of the auto shop, or the manager or whoever was in charge of it today, didn’t keep Clayton away from Jamal when Jamal and Alexandra came back, I think we would be excused for drawing some conclusions about the owner or manager’s opinions.

  “You better make sure the car’s OK before you take it on the interstate later.”

  “It’s Clay,” Jamal said. “He ain’t gonna let nobody do nothing dangerous to Alexandra’s ride.”

  Maybe not. Or at least not if he could stop it.

  “And if there is something wrong with it,” Jamal added, “Clay’ll let me know.”

  Good to know. “I guess we’re good to go to lunch, then?”

  “As good as we’ll ever be,” Jamal said. “I could eat.”

  “Me, too,” Alexandra said.

  Me, three. The Café on the Square in Sweetwater was out, though. Jamal would not appreciate the ambience, and the spindly chairs weren’t designed for someone of his height. “What are you in the mood for?”

  “Nothing fancy,” Jamal said, which meant the Wayside Inn was also out.

  We ended up at Beulah’s Meat’n Three, a small cinderblock building on the road between Columbia and Sweetwater.

  Beulah Odom ran it when I was a girl, and up until about six months ago. When she died, she left it to Yvonne McCoy, one of her waitresses, much to the chagrin of her remaining family: her brother Otis’s wife and daughter, who had counted on it coming to them. They’d had plans of turning it from the down-home meat’n three that it was and into some sort of fancy French bistro, or maybe that was just my interpretation of the situation.

  Beulah’s will had kyboshed that intention, anyway. It had taken a few months, and a court case, for her to be able to keep the place, but Yvonne was in full possession now.

  She was also an old flame of Rafe’s, or maybe it’s more accurate to say he was one of hers. She’s Dix’s age, a year younger than Rafe, two older than me, and one night in high school they’d decided to have sex. Yvonne once told me she’d have been happy to do it again, but Rafe hadn’t wanted to, so they’d kept it to that one time. She was still very flirtatious with him, though, and maybe that should have made me dislike her—it made me dislike Felicia Robinson, after all—but somehow I didn’t have it in me.

  That’s why, when we walked through the door of Beulah’s and saw Yvonne standing there at the hostess station, I was able to greet her with a perfectly natural, perfectly friendly smile. “Hi, Yvonne.”

  “Princess.” She grinned, and kept grinning even after she peered behind me and realized that Rafe wasn’t with me. That might have been why I liked her. “How many?”

  “Three of us and the baby,” I said, gesturing to Alexandra and Jamal. “Somewhere a little quiet, since I’ll probably have to feed her.”

  Jamal winced, but Yvonne nodded as if there was nothing unusual about this request. “Right this way.”

  She grabbed three menus and sashayed off down the aisle toward an empty booth by the window. “What can I get you to drink?” she asked when we had all slid into different sides of the booth and were in the process of removing jackets and scarves.

  I ordered sweet tea, Alexandra chocolate milk, and Jamal a Pepsi, and Yvonne withdrew, leaving the menus. “Everything is good here,” I said, opening mine. “All the usual small-town food, you know. Nothing fancy, but good.”

  “Nothing fancy suits me,” Jamal said and opened his menu.

  I turned to Alexandra. “How are you feeling?”

  She made a face. “Like I can’t wait for this to be over.”

  “Four more weeks?”

  “Five and three days.”

  She looked closer to popping than that. But maybe it was because she was seventeen and didn’t have any extra weight on her to balance the stomach. “It’ll be here before you know it,” I told her, and didn’t add, “and then you’ll wish you could shove it back inside for a while longer and get some sleep.”

  “Have you picked a name yet?” I asked instead. The baby was a boy, and last time we’d talked, she had threatened to name him Rafe.

  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the kid would have pretty big shoes to fill. And I’m not just talking about my husband’s, but the fact that Rafe might just be the quintessential tawdry romance novel name, and the poor kid would probably grow up to be a Lothario, through no fault of his own, if they named him that.

  “We’re still talking,” Alexandra said, with a look at Jamal. “Maybe Ramon.”

  “Ramon’s a good name.” Neither of them were Hispanic, but maybe it was Ramone-with-an-e, and if so, that made more sense.

  “Did you have a boy-name picked out, if you hadn’t had a girl?”

  “We talked about a few.” Tyrell, after Rafe’s father. Mother would have been horrified, of course, but we could have called him Ty. “William was high on the list.”

  “William is nice,” Alexandra said.

  “She turned out to be a girl, though, so she became Caroline instead.” After William’s mother. My great-great-a-few-more-greats-grandmother, who had taken up with one of the grooms while my great-great-grandfather had been off fighting the damn Yankees. I felt a lot of kinship with great-great-grandma Caroline. “Family names.”

  “Your father’s name is Steven,” I told Alexandra. “What about yours, Jamal?”

  Jamal shrugged. “Never knew him.”

  Oops. “That leaves the field wide open,” I said brightly, “doesn’t it?”

  Jamal gave me a little smirk, and I added, more naturally, “Rafe never knew who his dad was, either. Not until a year and a half ago, after his mother died. She had a newspaper clipping tucked away in her stuff, and that’s the first time Rafe knew his dad’s name.”

  Jamal nodded, with a sideways glance at Alexandra’s stomach. “I’m gonna be there for this baby.”

  “Good for you.” I left it at that. “Have you decided what you’re going to eat?”

  “Patty-melt and fries,” Jamal said.

  Always a safe choice. “Alexandra?”

  “Turkey sandwich,” Alexandra said. “The heartburn is killing me.”

  “Means the baby will have lots of hair.” Or so the old wives’ tales say.

  I turned to Maureen the waitress as she deposited the drinks on the table. “One patty-melt with fries, one turkey sandwich, and one Cobb salad, please. How are you, Maureen?”

  “Doing great,” Mo said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Fries with the sandwich, too?”

  I looked at Alexandra, who shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Better for you than onion rings,” Mo said. “Or maybe you’d like some mac and cheese, or something else instead?”

  Alexandra lit up. “Mac and cheese sounds great.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do, sugar. You just sit there and drink your milk.” She patted Alexandra’s shoulder and winked at me before she headed for the kitchen.

  “People are friendly down here,” Jamal remarked, watching her go.

  “Overall. There are exceptions.”

  And lo and behold, Maureen was dealing with one of them now. Not that he didn’t seem perfectly civil to her.

  After a moment, she continued toward the kitchen, and the man in question, stocky and gray-haired in a blue uniform, scooted out of the booth at the end of the row and came toward us. Or to
ward the front, and the cash register, with his bill in hand.

  I put a polite expression on my face. “Afternoon, Sergeant.”

  It took him a second to place me. Then the blank expression turned to a sneer. “Mrs. Collier, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said pleasantly. Or as pleasantly as I could in the face of the sneer. “Lunch break?”

  “A man’s gotta eat.” He glanced over his shoulder, to where his companion was just scooting out of the booth.

  My eyes widened, I admit it. “Officer Robinson.”

  She smirked, too. “Ma’am.”

  There was a pause. I had no idea what to say. I wanted to ask them what they were doing here, together, but it was none of my business, and anyway, they worked together, so why wouldn’t they have lunch? Rafe and Grimaldi had a bite to eat occasionally. Patrick Nolan and Lupe Vasquez eat together all the time, but of course they share a patrol car.

  Then again, for all I knew, so did Sergeant Tucker and Officer Robinson when she wasn’t working the front desk at the police department.

  So I gave them both a polite nod and wished them a good day. Tucker sneered and Felicia smirked, and then they filed past us. Felicia made eyes at Jamal on her way past. Tucker paid the bill, and outside in the parking lot, they walked past the window and over to a Columbia PD squad car I hadn’t noticed when we pulled in.

  “Friends of yours?” Jamal wanted to know, as he watched Tucker wedge himself behind the wheel.

  “Sergeant Tucker arrested Rafe for assault and battery thirteen years ago. His opinion of him hasn’t changed. And this weekend, I saw Felicia Robinson snuggling up to Rafe down in Laurel Hill.”

  If they were here because of Clayton and the neo-Nazis, I figured I didn’t have to explain what—or who—Laurel Hill was.

  “Skank,” Alexandra said succinctly.

  I nodded. “I feel like someone else’s husband ought to be off-limits, you know? No matter how handsome he is.”

  “Definitely,” Alexandra nodded, with a proprietary look at Jamal.

  I took them sightseeing after lunch, through Sweetwater, past the mansion, and back up to Columbia and the house on Fulton. The movers were gone, so we stopped for a few minutes to check out the inside and make sure it was empty, and also so I could get a first look at the damage without Michelle’s staging in the way.

  “Nice place,” Jamal said, standing on the stoop behind me and looking around while I got the key out of the box and into the lock.

  “Wait until you see the inside.” I twisted the knob and pushed the door open. “Two days ago it looked great. Then this happened.”

  I walked in with him behind me, while Alexandra brought up the rear with the baby. She’d wanted to practice handling the carrier, she said, even though Jamal had grumbled about her carrying something that heavy.

  “Wow.” She looked around, at what was now scratched wood floors and dented walls.

  I nodded. “It gets worse. The glass in the kitchen cabinets is broken. The mirrors and glass in the bathrooms have to be replaced. Most of the light fixtures have to be taken down and new ones put up. The back door is busted.” We were lucky all the windows were intact.

  “Any idea who broke in?” Jamal asked.

  I answered as I headed for the kitchen with them trailing behind me. “At the moment we’re thinking either Rodney Clark and his friends, or this middle-aged couple that came through the open house earlier in the day on Sunday. We outbid them for the house at auction, and when they were here, the wife or girlfriend,” or sister or business partner, for all I knew, “complained about all our finishes. Pretty much everything she talked about ended up broken.”

  Jamal nodded, and winced at the state of the kitchen. I did, too. With all the pretty touches gone, the fake-fruit bowl and dainty dish towels and trio of canisters, the damage looked worse than it had yesterday.

  “Whoever did it fashioned a noose of the bed sheet,” I explained when we walked into the master bedroom, “and hung it from the ceiling fan.”

  “That’s nasty,” Jamal said.

  I nodded. “That part of it points to Rodney and his friends. But other than that, I’m not sure we know enough right now to say who did this. It might not have been either of them.”

  Maybe it had been random. Just someone who saw an empty house and decided to have some fun by being destructive. It happens, more than it should. I hadn’t thought I had to worry about it in this neighborhood, but perhaps I’d been wrong.

  “Rafe looking into it?” Jamal asked, standing and looking around with his hands in his pockets. Alexandra was poking her head into the bathroom.

  I nodded. “He spent yesterday talking to people. Today, I know he was going to look at video footage from the traffic cam on the main road, and also what the officers dragged in from video doorbells around the neighborhood. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Long shot,” Jamal said, and I nodded. “And anyway, just because you see someone drive by, or walk by, a block or two away, don’t mean you can place’em here, with a tool in their hand.”

  No, it didn’t.

  I glanced at my watch. “If you’ve seen enough, we should probably head out. It’s almost two. And we don’t want to keep Clayton waiting.”

  Or Rodney, either.

  Jamal nodded.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I said, as we headed back the way we’d come, down the hallway and into the living room, “are you supposed to get into it with Clayton again when you pick up the car?”

  “Rafe said to play it by ear.” Jamal answered. “But it’s really gonna be up to Clay. He’s there with the bastards. If he thinks it’s gonna take more than this morning for them to invite him into their group, he’ll start something so we can give’em more. It depends on what happened after we left.”

  “So you don’t know what to expect.”

  He glanced at me as he stepped past me onto the stoop. “Makes it easier when you don’t. It’s hard to fake surprise.”

  I guess maybe it was. “Are you worried?”

  “No,” Jamal said, with a glance at Alexandra, while I locked the door behind us and tucked the key back into the lockbox. “We’re heading back to Nashville after this. Our only job was to show up and make Clay look good. We can’t be seen down here again.”

  And the chances that Rodney and company would follow them back to Nashville were slim, I assumed. Although I was sure Rafe and Wendell, and Jamal and Alexandra, would be aware of it, if Rodney did, and would be taking appropriate precautions.

  “Clay’s the one in the crosshairs,” Jamal added. “He’s down here trying to join the KKK. We ain’t in any danger. But Clay is, if they figure out what he’s doing.”

  “Rafe’ll keep an eye on him,” I said. “And Grimaldi and Bob Satterfield and everyone else. Nothing’s going to happen to Clayton.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Jamal said darkly and opened the back door of the Volvo so Alexandra could crawl in.

  Nine

  Everything was quiet when we got to the auto shop. The red Miata was parked outside, looking shiny and bright, and the flat tire was now as puffy and round as all the others.

  “I’ll wait until you’re ready to drive away,” I told Jamal, and I’ll readily admit that part of the reason was so that if anything happened—like an actual fist fight with Clayton—I’d get to see it, and of course report on it to Rafe. Who’d probably get a report from Jamal and possibly Clayton, too, about everything that had gone down today.

  Or maybe not from Clayton. He might have to be careful who he talked to for the next few days or weeks, so he didn’t give away his purpose for being there. Rafe had done a fair bit of that sort of deep undercover work, where he’d go for weeks or even months without talking to anybody on the outside, and it couldn’t be easy.

  Jamal opened his door. “Stay in the car until I get back out,” he told Alexandra, who nodded, but bit her lip.

  “Be careful.”

  “It’s Clay,�
�� Jamal said.

  “It isn’t only Clay. It’s Rodney, too. And who knows who else. And if they jump you, Clay won’t be able to help. Not without giving up his cover.”

  Jamal nodded. “I’ll be careful. But nothing’s gonna happen to me.”

  He unwound himself from the Volvo and slammed the door before he be-bopped toward the little office attached to one end of the auto shop. One of the two garage doors was pulled down, but through the other opening I could see a car on hydraulic lifts and people in overalls walking around underneath it. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to Jamal, and they certainly didn’t move as one toward the office once he’d gone inside.

  “Looks like it’s going to be OK,” I told Alexandra.

  She nodded. “It’s just scary, you know.”

  Oh, I knew. I was intimately acquainted with that particular fear. And knew the correct answer, too, even if it didn’t make anything better. “It’s part of who they are. They’re guys who take these kinds of risks so the rest of us can sleep better at night.”

  “Heroes,” Alexandra said.

  “Hell,” I mean, heck “yes.” Clayton was going undercover into a neo-Nazi hate group. A group that might possibly kill him if they figured out what he was doing. What could be more heroic than that?

  Of course, there was a chance that they were all hat and no cattle, as the Texans say—full of talk but no real action—and if so, the danger was minimal. And if the danger was minimal, nobody would be happier than me (and Rafe and Wendell and Jamal and, I’m sure, Clayton himself). But at the moment we were going on the assumption that since the group had guns, which we knew they did, that they were willing to use them on other people, which we didn’t know yet. And if they were willing to shoot to kill, then Clayton’s actions were very much heroic.

  There was a glass pane in the office door, but it was reinforced with what looked like chicken wire, and was hard to see through. I could just make out Jamal’s outline through the glass. It looked like he was leaning on the counter inside. From everything I could see, nothing at all was going on that we had to worry about.

  And that was borne out a minute later, when the door opened and he be-bopped back out, his skinny hips jiving as he made his way toward the Miata. He waved to Alexandra, and she opened her car door. “Thanks for the lift and lunch, Savannah.”